Increasing adoption of metered networks for connecting to and providing downloadable content to various computing devices such as, for example, laptop computers, notebook computers, professional digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, etc. can provide benefits if the computing devices are network cost sensitive. With metered networks, users can generally experience “bill shock” caused by network utilization that they are unaware of. It is increasingly being mandated by regulatory bodies that network operators do as much as possible to prevent users from the need to pay for more data usage than they signed up for.
With new form factors and computing devices being produced at a rapid rate, application developers are building more and more applications with connected experiences for the end user. The result is that users have no idea when enjoying these experiences as to the extent of bandwidth being utilized for content downloads and are thus susceptible to bill shock. This is becoming one of the top customer satisfaction issues with respect to network operators.
While interactive or user initiated network usage can still be justified to the user, anything transferred over the network in the background has to make sense for the user when downloading over metered networks. Making decisions whether to download content based on network costs associated therewith can also have repercussions for critical content such as, for example, security fixes, important documents or time sensitive material. A common approach undertaken by some operating systems/applications is to prevent downloading in the background over metered networks.
However, in some instances, it is in the interest of both the user and the network operator that certain critical content be delivered to the user in a timely fashion regardless of the potential cost associated with the download.